P.S.: This highly intense, emotional thing we were doing here shares some roots and methods with the thing the guys next door with the minis and battlemap were doing, but I repeated saying that evening that both are totally different hobbies. That's not to say that one person cannot like both, but they are very, very different.

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If you come across a post by a guest called Frank T, that was me. My former Forge account was destroyed in the Spam Wars. Collateral damage.

I like you Jenga tower - I vaguely remember something on the forge before about jenga towers. Rather than make up alot of complex rules for making uncertainty, its bang, there in front of you! Great!

Your observations on it being task based rather than conflict based are cut right to the issues about it, I think. Yeah, I've always thought a display of skill skill and guts simply can't be negated. I'd really like to see a playtest of it being used with a conflict based resolution - that'd be cool to see!

I don't understand how the Jenga towers worked - you state that deliberately pushing the tower is sacrificing yourself. But then, in an iffy 'game world just has to effect (rewrite) the rules' since your all part of one personality, anyone pushing it sacrifices you all. Bah! It should just sacrifice the personality that pushes it (or more to the point, it sacrifices the players stake in the game), just as the rule always was! So one part of his persona dies - seems cool to me.

What would be interesting though, is to somehow establish that if one personality dies, everyone else has to draw perhaps one or two blocks. That way they can influence everyone else going down - but it doesn't have to happen. But as is, that's just a stuff up by the GM - he's confused himself with the situation so much he's bungled the rules.

Anyway, I'd love to hear about using the jenga tower with conflict resolution, and deliberate toppling only takes out the person who toppled it. And as is, it sounded like a thrilling game! Thanks for posting it here!

I've read Dread and very much liked the use of the Jenga tower, but so far haven't tried it out. Being more into games with a less dominant GM at the moment, I've put the idea on hold. Your description have made me reconsider that decision.

The actual story reminds me of a Danish roleplaying scenario from 1997 called Arken. The slow revelation to the players that they are in fact all occupying the same body is excellent. It is, unfortunately, a one time gimmick (a bit like The Usual Suspects). For those with Danish skills who have not yet played Arken, here's a link: http://alexandria.dk/data?scenarie=11.

Dread has two very important game concepts: 1. Player buy in to the pre-sketched player characters through questions answered by the players at game start. 2. Increasing story intensity through the tower.

As you write, it seems best suited at player vs. GM play, not player vs. player. I think this is just something all participants need to accept, not playing outside the game board, so to speak.

However, I'm interested in how it actually works out with the tower. Does everyone accept that the tower actually represents the story development? Is the tower preventing resourceful players from bringing new ideas to the table, fearing that the likely result from any inventive action is a dead player character? Are some players gaming the story by defining unlikely player character capabilities early on where the risk is low? Do players accept that their only interface to the story is their player character and they (the player) must leave the story (the room) when their character dies?

I've been thinking about your write-up for a while, because one aspect of it is completely contrary to my own experiences with Dread. Specifically, I've found it really satisfying to participate in player versus player conflicts.

In the first game I played there was no player versus player stuff. We were spacers who found an abandoned spaceship, that turned out to be filled with creepy modified crew. The game was fun, but I can remember noting that all the adversity seemed to be coming from the GM towards us, and there was no real opportunity for us to contribute to the game.

The second game was 'kids go out to a creepy cabin the woods and somebody's trying to kill them' scenario. Here, it turned out that all of us were potential suspects, and we all had good reason to hate each other. Lots of player versus player conflict ensued, and that led to some of the most memorable points in the game.

I can certainly remember that these confrontations became "how far will you go to beat me?" situations. Players with good Jenga skills versus mediocre ones, single pulls from the tower versus voluntary double pulls. Basically, the last hour of this three hour con game was the edge-of-the-seat stuff.

Not sure where I'm going with this - just a different data point, I guess

i]will draw. For example, in our game, I accepted that Butch kicked me around and crushed both of my hands with his iron grip, because it did not seem worth drawing a piece. Then Sabine sacrificed her character and the tower was rebuilt. We had to draw six pieces from it before we could start again, but anyway, it was then much easier to draw pieces in order to pick up the phone despite my maimed hands and call 911.

Hi Steve,

I guess you must have had the IIEE straighter than we did. To use an example from our game: Justin wants to kill the old man in the wheelchair with a knife. I want to stop him. Positively the only way that this conflict can end by the rules<unless his player at some point decides to leave it be./i] draw. For example, in our game, I accepted that Butch kicked me around and crushed both of my hands with his iron grip, because it did not seem worth drawing a piece. Then Sabine sacrificed her character and the tower was rebuilt. We had to draw six pieces from it before we could start again, but anyway, it was then much easier to draw pieces in order to pick up the phone despite my maimed hands and call 911.

Hi Steve,

I guess you must have had the IIEE straighter than we did. To use an example from our game: Justin wants to kill the old man in the wheelchair with a knife. I want to stop him. Positively the only way that this conflict can end by the rules<unless his player at some point decides to leave it be.

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If you come across a post by a guest called Frank T, that was me. My former Forge account was destroyed in the Spam Wars. Collateral damage.

I would play that way as well, as I did for years with my friends: Freeform, immersion, strong GM to control the story. Until I discovered games with narrativistic game mechanics, taking the strong GM authority and distributing it more evenly between the participants using explicit rules.

However, I know some of my old roleplaying friends who would definately try to min/max the game and let that influence their approach to the story. I.e. playing to win the game more than tell a story. So I was wondering if Dread requires an agreement up front that players don't play the game but tell the story? Or if player abuse is kept at bay by the almighty GM? I.e. back to the implicit social rules.

My experience with The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach is mixed because of the confusion whether the goal is to win the game or to tell the best story. I speculate that Dread can have the same weakness. Especially the competition about not being the one who collapses the tower that everyone knows is about to fall. On the other hand, I can definately see the fascinating aspects in pushing the players to accept a lot of punishment when the tower is about to fall.

I think playing Dread and not engaging in the fiction is nearly impossible and at any rate a terrible waste. Also, in order to function, it relies on some shared sense of what's plauslible, or possible. That's not much different from games like e.g. The Pool or Primetime Adventures where "what's possible" is also not at all covered by the rules. These games, just like Dread, have rules that are so straight and simple that they really don't leave much space for "gaming", system-wise. They rely heavily on a spirit of mutualism between the players, and in my experience they tend to inspire such mutualism. Of course you can still engage strongly and want your character to succeed, but that's not the same thing as wanting to "win the game".

The Roach, on the other hand, leaves more room for a little gambling, and also by choice of fictional content has a tendency to get over the top and a little silly (much the way InSpectres often does). Jason addressed that specific problem through the "no bullshit" rule.

- Frank

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If you come across a post by a guest called Frank T, that was me. My former Forge account was destroyed in the Spam Wars. Collateral damage.

Hmmm, I don't really like that. It puts the imagined space ahead of an agreement made between real people (I assume you went into play thinking everyone had agreed to 'Only the player who pushes the tower loses his stake'), and it does so without really thinking about doing it. Which means little reflection post game on whether it was a good idea, because they didn't really think about it as an idea to begin with.

Also the person who can switch around how the rule works is working at a higher level than everyone else who is working with that rule. That means he just has control - there's no conflict which will turn his control into something unexpected and take the group by surprise. Again, by not really thinking about doing this, he also wont reflect on how he's in this position.

But by saying I don't like that, I think it doesn't meet certain goals of play. You can probably see my goals pretty clearly amidst my bias. So as a disclaimer, they don't have to be your goals of play, of course.

It's not the lack of mechanical means to change the story - that's all been done before and it's great. What bothers my goals is that there was an agreement about rules, and one person there ignored a real life agreement in favour of 'how the game world works'.

And I'm not imagining that it was horrific. But it makes me think of situations on the edge, like BASE jumping or a kid bouncing around in a kitchen that has pots on the stove, boiling. Except that with BASE jumping the guys have thought about it, while the kid has no considered what could go wrong. Sure, take on extreme danger - but I don't like a lack of consideration of whether there is any danger. Here it's breaking a promise to follow certain rules, and that's risky and risk is fine, but I don't think he's considered whether what he's doing contains risk.

Meh, maybe I just want to be recognised for the risk I've taken on, and someone who doesn't see it wont recognise the adversity that was faced. And yeah, sometimes that sort/level of risk is too much for me as well, I'll admit. So it's a few things.

Sorry, I took your previous thoughts 'Can I tumble the tower and sacrifice my character, but through this move also own your character?' and that PS as an answer to my question that you would eliminate the entire split personality, ie every player. Sorry for the missunderstood posts!